Tuesday, January 22, 2013

The Texas Criminal Justice Coalition sent out an email today describing new legislation that will be filed soon, according to Christopher Burnett of the Governor's Criminal Justice Division:

In 2012, Governor Perry created CJAC by executive order
to examine aspects of Texas specialty courts (drug courts, veterans’
courts, family drug courts, etc.) Over the last year, CJAC volunteers
have spent countless hours looking at questions of evidence-based best
practices, oversight, protection of participants’ rights, the role of
court team members, and the need for solid data to measure specialty
court efficacy. During this legislative session, the results of CJAC’s
work will be presented through a bill authored by Senator Joan Huffman.

The bill’s main purposes will be to consolidate the majority of
existing specialty court statutes in one place, clarify the requirements
that these courts report their existence to the Governor’s Criminal Justice Division
(CJD), further define the role of court team members, develop outcome-
and evidence-based best practices to serve as guidance for courts, and
require the collection of minimal but standardized performance data.

Specialty courts only work when judges and other team members have the
maximum flexibility to tailor their particular court to fit local needs
and resources. A cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all, governed-from-Austin
model of how specialty courts should operate simply won’t work. The
original authors of the various specialty court statutes understood this
and so do the members of CJAC.

Over the last ten years, the number of specialty courts in Texas grew
from nine to around 140. This rapid growth and the ability to gather
meaningful data have been difficult to track. Legislators, county
judges, county commissioners, and all involved need to see if these
courts continue to do what they were designed to do: keep people from
unnecessarily going deeper into the criminal justice system; restore
broken lives; and free up scare space in county jails and state prisons
for those truly requiring incarceration. CJD believes the proposed bill
will help accomplish those goals.

Burnett foresees that, "the next step in specialty court evolution as
being the transfer of CJD’s limited oversight of and data collection
responsibilities for these courts to another state agency. The where
and when will be determined by the Texas Legislature," though offhand one imagines the Office of Court Administration seems like a logical spot. See the rest here.

9 comments:

Anonymous
said...

Just what this state needs, another agency with criminal justice in the title.. Funny how CJD mentions they don't want cookie cutter governing from Austin, yet they want all of the courts to send all of their stats/information to them?

Just another hypocritical agency, similiar to the lard asses in charge at tcoommi.

Hey smartass who thinks he knows everything about the criminal justice system.

The stats have actually been compiled, for many years now and sent to tcoommi and cjad. Funny that you know everything about everything since you hang out at the capital a few times a month.. TCOOMMI sends the reports of the stats to the lbb. But i'm sure you already knew that.

So if courts in general don't practice evidence based sentencing, then those same jurisdictions can ask for more money to create a specialty court. And the basis for granting the request for specialty court $$ is because of high incarceration rates? Talk about a proverbial dog chasing its tail.I'm sorry 2:39 but TACOOMMI doesn't know their ass from a hole in the ground. What buisiness do they have sending in any reports? Its a good day if TACOOMI just shows up for work.

2:39, we're talking about different things. 1:55's reference, I thought, was to the Governor's CJD's demand that counties update their arrest and adjudication data or lose federal grant funds, which most of them only did when that mild but effective coercion was applied. Also, I may not know everything, but I do know that the Governor's Criminal Justice Division (CJD) - the subject of this post - and "CJAD" at TDCJ are different entities. Your comments appear to confuse them amidst your TCOOMMI obsession. Focus, amigo, focus!

There have been a bunch of national, and international studies, which have come out in the past few years showing drug court DO NOT WORK as they say. That most studies which suggest so, are improper in their controls and cost analysis. Studies include:

It is about time these things are put under proper scrutiny, and are forced to collect data in some uniform manner in which nationally recognized research institutions can conduct studies on them, not the local yocal community college that is best friends with the local drug court managers....

6:25, I'm all for applying close, outcome-based scrutiny to specialty courts and redirecting funding from the ones that don't work. But I think the research on strong probation shows better outcomes than you portray. From what I've read and heard, the general consensus is that when more resources are applied, strong probation measures work pretty well, e.g., see this assessmet.

Now, different judges run them different ways, and you're right more research needs to be done to clarify what works and to steer specialty courts toward those methods. But I don't think the evidence supports your assertion that drug courts, mental health courts etc., should be abolished outright.

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